


Across Distances (Close to You)

by jazzjo



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-27
Updated: 2014-12-27
Packaged: 2018-03-03 19:48:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2884847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jazzjo/pseuds/jazzjo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the secluded privacy of her own quarters, Jemma retreated into the navy blue solace her dashboard provided. No matter how much her experiments and research for the day excited her, or how many butterflies saw fit to take up residence in her stomach when Agent Morse spoke with her or swung by the lab to assist, her own PhD front and centre in Jemma’s mind, she never stopped anticipating her return to her laptop to see the white number above her ask box. Always the same person, and she would finally get to meet her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Across Distances (Close to You)

_Pairing_ : Jemma Simmons/Bobbi Morse

 

_Summary_ : In the secluded privacy of her own quarters, Jemma retreated into the navy blue solace her dashboard provided. No matter how much her experiments and research for the day excited her, or how many butterflies saw fit to take up residence in her stomach when Agent Morse spoke with her or swung by the lab to assist, her own PhD front and centre in Jemma’s mind, she never stopped anticipating her return to her laptop to see the white number above her ask box. Always the same person, and she would finally get to meet her. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

Her footsteps quickened as she returned to her quarters, sliding the heavy metal door securely shut behind her. Undoing her necktie with one hand and placing it in the hamper next to her closet, Jemma moved to open her laptop. Fingers flying deftly over the keyboard, she had unlocked the machine and reopened Tumblr within the span of a couple of keystrokes. 

 

She had a half hour before they were going to head to the quinjet. This was how she was going to spend the better part of that half hour, no doubt. 

 

Jemma (or rather, _loyaltoscience_ ) had long been proudly part of the so-called “science side of Tumblr”. 

 

It had been a twist of fate that had led to both her and another blogger explaining another one of those inane posts on the mitochondria being the powerhouse of the cell, and now she and _bio-and-weaponry_ had struck up pretty incredible camaraderie.

 

Now Jemma rarely got back to her bunk without finding another message or two in her ask box from _bio-and-weaponry_. 

 

Before she focused on the two messages that had been newly added to her ask box, Jemma scrolled all the way to the bottom of the page, allowing herself to reminisce on the very beginnings of this friendship. 

 

Rain had been thrumming and pounding on the metallic exterior of the Bus, the interior quiet as everyone had returned to their own pods after a pretty draining day. Jemma had been too tired and frustrated to do much more than to open Chrome and type in a measly singular ’t’ and allow the browser to fill in the blanks for her. 

 

The then bright red ‘1’ hovering at the top of her page had surprised her, to say the very least. 

 

It had just been science at the beginning — _bio-and-weaponry_ had studied biology at first, but their current job left them not much room to work with science, apart from helping out in assignments that were not their own. Needless to say, Jemma’s tiredness had dissipated as they spent the better part of that night exchanging messages on their insights and interests in the vast fields of Biology. 

 

Now the numbers that alerted Jemma to her new messages were white, stark against the darker blue of the background. The words had a different impact on her now as well — previously she had just been excited to talk about her passion, now it was churning in her stomach and a blush that no one but her would ever know about. 

 

The words themselves were different. Jemma had half a mind not to deny the undertones of flirting that existed in many of their exchanges. 

 

Biology still was a vein that ran through their messages, for the most part. One of the two messages that she had been sent was marvelling at a new theory that Jemma had proposed that morning, about the possibility of a culture that _bio-and-weaponry_ had been working on reproducing sexually rather than asexually. 

 

But the other message was more personal. Music, they had most recently been talking about. About how they had both always played various instruments, but were at points in their lives where it was no longer feasible. About how much they missed the vibrations beneath their fingers or their lips. 

 

After all, Jemma could not really have brought an entire piano aboard the Bus. 

 

_bio-and-weaponry_ played the cello, among other things. They had mentioned that it would greatly distress the others that they lived with if they were to bring loud instruments (like a saxophone) into their living environment. 

Jemma wished she could do something, really. 

 

Beginning to type her first response, Jemma’s fingers stilled over the keyboard as she realised that there was another detail in the second message that she had not taken note of. 

 

‘ _I’ll be in Singapore for a day or so tomorrow. Weird place, yes, but any chance you’d be anywhere around there? If you want to meet up, that is. It’s completely fine if you don’t.’_

 

Jemma pounded out the first response as quickly as her fingers possibly could manage. Straightening her shirt and sweater, she shot out of her room and stopped the first person she met in the communal hallway. 

 

“Singapore, yes?” Jemma floundered as she brushed flyaway strands of hair behind her ear, “We will be heading to Singapore with Coulson and May for them to rendezvous with Maria Hill tomorrow?”

 

“And we get a day off,” Mack replied, grinning at the scientist’s frazzled but ecstatic demeanour.

 

Turning on her heel and heading back into her room, Jemma turned and chirped over her shoulder, “Thanks, Mack!”

 

_‘What a fateful coincidence! I will be there for tomorrow as well. Shall we meet then? Perhaps at that bookstore you were telling me about the other day?’_

 

The reply came almost instantaneously once she sent the message, a brilliant winking smiley at the end of it confirming that they would meet at BooksActually at fourteen hundred hours local time. Faintly she heard Mack’s voice boom through the walls of the corridor of rooms that the team occupied, a good-natured exclamation over everyone being so excited over a day off in Singapore. 

 

Jemma’s tongue poked at her front teeth as she smiled, closing her laptop and pulling together a bag for their trip.    
  
  


 

* * *

 

 

May was piloting, that much assured Jemma as she buckled in for takeoff. There were shreds of memories that haunted her, of what Ward had done to her and Fitz. Flying was something that would take Jemma a while to get used to now, to stay aboard with the assurance that she could trust the people on the plane and the person flying the plane most of all. 

 

The fact that Bobbi was seated next to her with a warm hand on her back as she buried her head in her hands pushed her heart back down from its place it her throat, but that muscle doubled up its pumping and her heart rate skyrocketed. 

 

Thank goodness she did not wear a heart rate monitor like Skye did. 

 

When she had finally righted herself, her rational mind kicking the panic in its guts and helping to quell the fear, Bobbi did not remove her hand just yet. The taller woman reminded her to breathe, slowly and deeply, and to call for her if she felt panicked again before rising and moving away, promising not to move to far away. 

 

The fluttering in her chest took a good while to slow down — sixteen breaths, in and out as she consciously thought through every motion of her ribcage, diaphragm and both sets of intercostal muscles. 

 

It was replaced with a dark blush, a burning one of the heavy sort that weighed on her conscience. 

 

The fluttering, that alone made her feel like she was split between two choices. A choice she should have made before she let herself get in this deep. 

 

She was going to meet _bio-and-weaponry_ , finally. 

 

But the fluttering was something she felt for them both. It made her feel… _off_ , almost. That she had always felt that she personally would always be loyal to only one person, and would consequently feel attraction accordingly, but that her own consciousness was betraying her. 

 

 

* * *

 

The entirety of their core team had headed off in various directions once the quinjet had landed on the roof of a building in what Hill had referred to as the CBD, the Central Business District. 

 

Anyone and everyone below a Level Seven (much at the behest of Coulson, who insisted that he had destroyed that system already) had been escorted out of the building and given a reminder to meet back on the helicopter landing pad at 20 00 that evening, local time. 

 

Half an hour. She had a half hour to get to the bookstore, and a trip that (according to Google Maps because she wasn’t half as adept at hacking satellites as Skye was) would take twenty six of those thirty minutes. 

 

Her eyes searched the area around her for the sign for the subway station, finding nothing but rushing businesspeople heading back to their offices from lunch and the rest of the team trying to find their ways around. A hand found her shoulder and she turned, raising her head to meet Bobbi’s eyes.

 

“Need help, Simmons?” Bobbi offered, smirking as she took in Jemma’s pacing. 

 

“Just trying to find the subway station, is all,” Jemma paused, her hand running through her hair as she cast another look around, “I can’t seem to find it.”

 

Bobbi turned Jemma, gently, pointing to the black sign hanging down from an entrance to the underground that declared that it was the station for _Raffles Place NS26 EW14_. 

 

Great. 

 

Her feet carried her towards the escalators before she could properly register the assistance, leaving Jemma to throw her thanks over her shoulder at Bobbi’s retreating figure as she strode towards what was probably the bus stop. 

 

It really was just Jemma’s luck that she had ended up in what must have been one of the most complicated subway (rather, MRT, Jemma corrected inwardly) stations on the island. 

 

She had boarded the wrong escalator twice on her way to the platform, and thanked the colour coded signs as she finally found the platform she was looking for, just as the voice over the speakers announced that the doors were closing. 

 

Throughout her six minute long train ride Jemma tried to straighten her clothes and tame her frazzled hair, before alighting at her assigned stop and attempting to navigate the twisting roads to find the bookstore. 

 

Eventually she had given up on following the instructions she had written down, choosing instead to consult passersby. A good series of faulty directions later, a pair of teenage girls had finally walked her to the café directly across from the bookstore and ducked in themselves, pointing her to the door of the bookstore. 

 

This was it, and with a minute to spare. 

 

Jemma ran a hand through her hair and adjusted her necktie, stubbing her toe on the curb as she crossed the road. 

 

_Maybe they wouldn’t hit it off in person. After all, they had only ever conversed over the internet, with words and time and two computer screens between them as a buffer._

 

For a moment there Jemma had wanted to just run off, to abandon this meeting and ignore the glorious coincidence that had gifted her this chance. 

 

But that was not the sort of person Jemma Simmons was. 

 

Placing one shaking hand on the cool metal of the door handle, Jemma stared at her own feet as she pushed the door open and relished in the respite from the heat outside. She felt the ambience of the bookstore surround her immediately, breathing in the crisp yet weighted smell of books both new and old. 

 

There was hesitance tugging at Jemma’s mind, keeping her head down and focused on the books stacked about the charming little shop instead of on anyone who might also be in the store. 

 

A hand slipped before her and deposited a singular yellow post-it on the hard cover of something called _Between Stations_ right in her line of sight. 

 

 

** {Are you loyal to science?} **

 

 

The handwriting stood somewhere between cursive and careless, the scrawl of royal blue ink with hesitation clear in the heaviness of the curves but the sharp lines, dots and crosses. 

 

Jemma pulled her eyes away from the letters that had formed by hand instead of binary code, raising her eyes and turning to her left only to find that the person behind those words which had given her such butterflies was taller than her. 

 

Tall enough for Jemma to be faced with her chest rather than her eyes. 

 

“Jemma,” A voice began, above Jemma’s own line of sight as she tried to will the blush off her cheeks. 

 

“That’s my name as—” Jemma began, lifting her eyes to glance upwards before allowing her jaw to drop slightly, “Bobbi?”

 

“Guess we were closer than we thought we were, huh?”

 

All Jemma could manage was a muted nod, her mind still reeling from the new development. 

 

“Don’t you seem nervous,” Bobbi drawled, before cracking a sincere smile and putting a hand on Jemma’s shoulder, “You don’t have to be, you know? This doesn’t change anything.”

 

Faced with silence once more, Bobbi’s voice dropped as she spoke once more, “Unless you want it to, in which case I completely understand.”

 

Jemma raised herself onto the tips of her toes, placing a soft chaste kiss on the corner of Bobbi’s mouth. 

 

“We have the next four to five hours to ourselves,” Jemma began, lowering herself and allowing her hair to fall in her face as she returned her gaze to her feet, “I’m sure we could figure it out in the meantime.”

 

 

 

 


End file.
